Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-gvh9x Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-22T17:07:07.621Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Race and Determinations of Discrimination: Vigilance, Cynicism, Skepticism, and Attitudes about Legal Mobilization in Employment Civil Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

David McElhattan ,
Laura Beth Nielsen  and
Jill D. Weinberg
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

What factors affect whether ordinary citizens believe that workplace decisions involving African-American employees rise to the level of discrimination? When do observers believe targets of possible race discrimination should consider mobilizing the law? We use a factorial design vignette study administered to a nationally representative sample of 2,087 ordinary people to address these questions. The “vigilance hypothesis” predicts that minorities will be more likely to perceive discrimination than whites. Our analysis partially confirms this: African Americans perceive anti-Black discrimination at higher rates than do whites and Latinos, while Latinos do not show a significant difference from whites. Where respondents believe discrimination occurred, we analyze what influences whether respondents might recommend legal mobilization. The “cynicism hypothesis” suggests that people of color may be less likely to favor using law. We find, however, that African-American and Latino respondents express more confidence in civil litigation, compared to whites. Further, African Americans express the strongest support for legal mobilization (recommending that a “friend” contact an attorney), while whites and Latinos do not differ in mobilization recommendations.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 669 - 703
Copyright
© 2017 Law and Society Association.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We are grateful to Robert L. Nelson, Jeremy Freese, Liora Israël, Kangsan Lee, and Gabrielle Ferrales for their insight and generous support. We thank the anonymous reviewers at LSR for their invaluable feedback. We also thank the members of the American Bar Foundation faculty and research committee who helped us with this project including: Robert Sampson, John Hagan, Michael McCann, Stuart Macaulay, Elizabeth Mertz, Carol Heimer, and Janice Nadler. We give special thanks to Kat Albrecht and Anya Degenshein for their research assistance. The research benefited from presentations at the Law and Society Association meetings in Boston and Minneapolis, the Empirical Critical Race Theory Workshop, the Fellows Advisory Research Committee of the American Bar Foundation, L'École des hautes études en sciences sociales, and the Chicago Area Legal Writing Group. The research was funded by the American Bar Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. All errors and conclusions are those of the authors.

References

Albiston, Catherine (2005) “Mobilizing Employment Rights in the Workplace,” in Nielsen, L. B. & Nelson, R., eds., Handbook of Employment Discrimination Research: Rights and Realities. Dordrecht: Springer. 301–24.Google Scholar
Albiston, Catherine R. (2006) “Legal Consciousness and Workplace Rights,” in Fleury-Steiner, B. & Nielsen, L. B., eds., New Civil Rights Research: A Constitutive Approach. Burlington: Ashgate. 55–76.Google Scholar
Albiston, Catherine R. (2010) Institutional Inequality and the Mobilization of the Family and Medical Leave Act: Rights on Leave. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alexander, Michelle (2010) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Anderson, Elijah (1999) Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. New York: W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Auspurg, Katrin, et al. (2009) “Complexity, Learning Effects, and the Plausibility of Vignettes in Factorial Surveys.” Paper presented at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, August 7–11, San Francisco, California.Google Scholar
Avakame, Edem F., et al. (1999) “Did You Call the Police? What Did They Do?' An Empirical Assessment of Black's Theory of Mobilization of Law,” 16 Justice Q. 765–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bashi, Vilna & McDaniel, Antonio (1997) “A Theory of Immigration and Racial Stratification,” 27 J. of Black Studies 668–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baumer, Eric P. (2002) “Neighborhood Disadvantage and Police Notification by Victims of Violence,” 40 Criminology 579–616.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, Monica C. (2016) “Situational Trust: How Disadvantaged Mothers Reconceive Legal Cynicism,” 50 Law & Society Rev. 314–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berrey, Ellen, et al. (2012) “Situated Justice: A Contextual Analysis of Fairness and Inequality in Employment Discrimination Litigation,” 46 Law & Society Rev. 1–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berrey, Ellen, et al. (2017) Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Best, Rachel Kahn, et al. (2011) “Multiple Disadvantages: An Empirical Test of Intersectionality Theory in EEO Litigation,” 45 Law & Society Rev. 991–1025.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bobo, Lawrence & Kluegel, James R. (1993) “Opposition to Race-Targeting: Self-Interest, Stratification Ideology, or Racial Attitudes?” 58 American Sociological Rev. 443–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bobo, Lawrence & Thompson, Victor (2006) “Unfair by Design: The War on Drugs, Race, and the Legitimacy of the Criminal Justice System,” 73 Social Research 445–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo (2002) “We are all Americans! The Latin Americanization of Racial Stratification in the USA,” 5 Race & Society 3–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo (2003) Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo (2004) “From Bi-Racial to Tri-Racial: Towards a New System of Racial Stratification in the USA,” 27 Ethnic and Racial Studies 931–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, et al. (2003) “It Wasn't Me!” : How Will Race and Racism Work in 21st Century America,” 12 Research in Political Sociology 111–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brooks, Richard R. W. (2000) “Fear and Fairness in the City: Criminal Enforcement and Perceptions of Fairness in Minority Communities,” 73 Southern California Law Rev. 1219–74.Google Scholar
Brooks, Richard R. W. & Jeon-Slaughter, Haekyung (2001) “Race, Income, and Perceptions of the U.S. Court System,” 19 Behavioral Sciences and the Law 249–64.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bumiller, Kristin (1988) The Civil Rights Society: The Social Construction of Victims. Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Burke, Thomas F. (2002) Lawyers, Lawsuits, and Legal Rights. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.Google Scholar
Carr, Patrick J., et al. (2007) “We Never Call the Cops and Here is Why: A Qualitative Examination of Legal Cynicism in Three Philadelphia Neighborhoods,” 45 Criminology 445–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cole, David (1999) No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
Crenshaw, Kimberle Williams (1988) “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law,” 101 Harvard Law Rev. 1331–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Curran, Barbara A. (1977) The Legal Needs of the Public: The Final Report of a National Survey. Chicago: American Bar Foundation.Google Scholar
DeNavas-Walt, Carmen & Proctor, Bernadette D. (2015) Income and Poverty in the United States: 2014. In Current Population Reports: United States Census Bureau.Google Scholar
Desmond, Matthew, et al. (2016) “Police Violence and Citizen Crime Reporting in the Black Community,” 81 American Sociological Rev. 857–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dixon, K.A., et al. (2002) A Workplace Divided: How Americans View Discrimination and Race on the Job. Rutgers: The State Univ. of New York, John J. Heldrich Center for Workplace Development.Google Scholar
Edelman, Lauren B. & Suchman, Mark C. (1997) “The Legal Environments of Organizations,” 23 Annual Rev. of Sociology 479–515.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edelman, Lauren B., et al. (1999) “The Endogeneity of Legal Regulation: Grievance Procedures as Rational Myth,” 105 American J. of Sociology 406–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engel, David M. & Munger, Frank W. (1996) “Rights, Remembrance, and the Reconciliation of Difference,” Law and Society Rev. 30 7–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ennis, Sharon R., et al. (2011) The Hispanic Population: 2010. In 2010 Census Briefs: U.S. Census Bureau.Google Scholar
Ewick, Patricia & Silbey, Susan S. (1998) The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Felstiner, William, et al. (1980) “The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, and Claiming,” 15 Law and Society Rev. 631–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forman, Tyrone A., et al. (2002) “Neither Black nor White? An Empirical Test of the Latin Americanization Thesis,” 5 Race & Society 65–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freeman, Alan (1978) “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine,” 62 Minnesota Law Rev. 1049–119.Google Scholar
Galanter, Marc (1974) “Why The Haves Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change,” 9 Law & Society Rev. 95–160.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Galanter, Marc S. (1983) “Reading the Landscape of Disputes: What We Know and Don't Know (and Think We Know) About Our Allegedly Contentious and Litigious Society,” 31 UCLA Law Rev. 4–71.Google Scholar
Garland, David (2001) “Introduction: The Meaning of Mass Imprisonment, “ in Garland, David, ed., Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences. London: Sage. 1–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gomez, Laura E. (2012) “Looking for Race in All the Wrong Places,” 46 Law & Society Rev. 221–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hagan, John & Albonetti, Celesta (1982) “Race, Class, and the Perception of Criminal Injustice in America,” 88 American J. of Sociology 329–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hagan, John, et al. (2008) “How Law Rules: Torture, Terror, and the Normative Judgments of Iraqi Judges,” 42 Law & Society Rev. 605–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hagan, John, et al. (2005) “Race, Ethnicity, and Youth Perceptions of Criminal Injustice,” 70 American Sociological Rev. 381–407.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haltom, William & McCann, Michael W. (2004) Distorting the Law: Politics, Media, and the Litigation Crisis. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hans, Valerie P. & Lofquist, William S. (1996) “Jurors' Judgments of Business Liability in Tort Cases: Implications for the Litigation Explosion Debate,” 26 Law & Society Rev. 85–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirsh, Elizabeth & Lyons, Christopher J. (2010) “Perceiving Discrimination on the Job: Legal Consciousness, Workplace Context, and the Construction of Race Discrimination,” 44 Law & Society Rev. 269–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Inman, Mary L. (2001) “Do You See What I See? Similarities and Differences in Victims' and Observers' Perceptions of Discrimination,” 19 Social Cognition 521–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirk, David S. & Matsuda, Mauri (2011) “Legal Cynicism, Collective Efficacy, and the Ecology of Arrest,” 49 Criminology 443–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirk, David S. & Papachristos, Andrew V. (2011) “Cultural Mechanisms and the Persistence of Neighborhood Violence,” 116 American J. of Sociology 1190–233.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kluegel, James & Bobo, Lawrence D. (2001) “Perceived Group Discrimination and Policy Attitudes: The Sources and Consequences of the Race and Gender Gaps,” in O'Connor, A., Tilly, C. & Bobo, L. D., eds., Urban Inequality: Evidence from Four Cities. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 163–217.Google Scholar
Krosnick, Jon A., et al. (2015) “The Future of Survey Research: Challenges and Opportunities,” Report to the National Science Foundation presented by the National Science Foundation Advisory Board for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Subcommittee on Advancing SBE Survey Research, May 2015. Available at: http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/AC_Materials/The_Future_of_Survey_Research.pdf (accessed 18 August 2016)Google Scholar
Krysan, Maria (2000) “Prejudice, Politics, and Public Opinion: Understanding the Sources of Racial Policy Attitudes,” 26 Annual Rev. of Sociology 135–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lucas, Samuel Roundfield (2008) Theorizing Discrimination in an Era of Contested Prejudice. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Macaulay, Stewart (1963) “Non-contractual Relations in Business: A Preliminary Study,” 28 American Sociological Rev. 55–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Major, Brenda & Kaiser, Cheryl (2005) “Perceiving and Claiming Discrimination.” in Nielsen, L. B. & Nelson, R., eds., Handbook of Employment Discrimination Research: Rights and Realities. Dordrecht: Springer. 285–300.Google Scholar
Major, Brenda, et al. (2002) “Antecedents and Consequences of Attributions of Discrimination: Theoretical and Empirical Advances,” 34 Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 251–330.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McCann, Michael W. (1994) Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle (1990) Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class Americans. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle (2003) “Rights Talk and the Experience of Law: Implementing Women's Human Rights to Protection from Violence,” 25 Human Rights Q. 343–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Richard & Sarat, Austin (1981) “Grievances, Claims, and Disputes: Assessing the Adversary Culture,” 15 Law & Society Rev. 525–66.Google Scholar
Myrick, Amy, et al. (2012) “Race and Representation: Racial Disparities in Legal Representation for Employment Civil Rights Plaintiffs,” 15 New York University J. of Legislation and Public Policy 705–58.Google Scholar
Nielsen, Laura Beth (2000) “Situating Legal Consciousness: Experiences and Attitudes of Ordinary Citizens about Law and Street Harassment,” 34 Law & Society Rev. 1055–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nielsen, Laura Beth (2004) License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Nielsen, Laura Beth & Beim, Aaron (2004) “Media Misrepresentation: Title VII, Print Media, and Public Perceptions of Discrimination Litigation,” 15 Stanford Law and Policy Rev. 101–30.Google Scholar
Nielsen, Laura Beth & Nelson, Robert L. (2005) “Scaling the Pyramid: A Sociolegal Model of Employment Discrimination Litigation,” in Nielsen, L. B. & Nelson, R., eds., Handbook of Employment Discrimination Research. Chicago: Springer. 3–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nielsen, Laura Beth, et al. (2010) “Individual Justice or Collective Legal Mobilization? Employment Discrimination Litigation in the Post Civil Rights United States.” 7 J. of Empirical Legal Studies 175–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Omi, Michael & Winant, Howard (1994) Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pager, Devah (2003) “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” 108 American J. of Sociology 937–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pager, Devah, et al. (2009) “Race at Work: Realities of Race and Criminal Record in the NYC Job Market,” in Manza, Jeff & Sauder, Michael, eds., Inequality and Society: Social Science Perspectives on Social Stratification. New York: W.W. Norton. 425–31.Google Scholar
Rossi, Peter H. & Anderson, Andy B. (1982) “The Factorial Survey Approach: An Introduction,” in Rossi, P. H. & Nock, Steven L., eds., Measuring Social Judgments: The Factorial Survey Approach. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications. 15–67.Google Scholar
Sampson, Robert J. & Bartusch, Dawn Jeglum (1998) “Legal Cynicism and (Subcultural?) Tolerance of Deviance: The Neighborhood Context of Racial Differences,” 32 Law & Society Rev. 777–804.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sandefur, Rebecca L. (2008) “Access to Civil Justice and Race, Class, and Gender Inequality,” 34 Annual Rev. of Sociology 339–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sarat, Austin (1990) “The Law is All Over: Power, Resistance, and the Legal Consciousness of the Welfare Poor,” 3 Yale J. of Law and Humanities 343–79.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin & Kearns, Thomas R. (1995) Law in Everyday Life. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Schuman, Howard, et al. (1997) Racial Attitudes in America: Trends and Interpretations. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Silbey, Susan S. (2005) “After Legal Consciousness,” 1 Annual Rev. of Law and Social Science 323–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Slocum, Lee Ann, et al. (2010) “Neighborhood Structural Characteristics, Individual-Level Attitudes, and Youths' Crime Reporting Intentions,” 48 Criminology 1063–100.Google Scholar
Smith, Tom W. (2002) “Measuring Racial and Ethnic Discrimination.” GSS Methodological Report 96. University of Chicago: National Opinion Research Center.Google Scholar
Sullivan, Laura, et al. (2015) The Racial Wealth Gap. Waltham: Institute for Assets & Social Policy, Brandeis Univ.Google Scholar
Sunshine, Jason & Tyler, Tom R. (2003) “The Role of Procedural Justice and Legitimacy in Shaping Public Support for Policing,” 37 Law & Society Rev. 513–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taub, Nadine & Schneider, Elizabeth M. (1998) “Women's Subordination and the Role of Law,” in Kairys, D. ed., The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Tuch, Steven A. & Hughes, Michael (1996) “Whites' Racial Policy Attitudes,” 77 Social Science Q. 723–45.Google Scholar
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (2015) Charge Statistics Fiscal Year 1997 Through Fiscal Year 2014. Available at: http://eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/enforcement/charges.cfm (accessed 15 August 2016).Google Scholar
Wallander, Lisa (2012) “Measuring Social Judgements: Why and How to Use the Factorial Survey Approach in the Study of Professional Judgements,” 12 J. of Social Work 364–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weitzer, Ronald (2014) “The Puzzling Neglect of Hispanic Americans in Research on Police-Citizen Relations,” 37 Ethnic and Racial Studies 1995–2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weitzer, Ronald & Tuch, Steven A. (1999) “Race, Class, and Perceptions of Discrimination by the Police,” 45 Crime & Delinquency 494–507.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yngvesson, Barbara (1985) “Legal ideology and community justice in the clerk's office,” 9 The Legal Studies Forum 71–87.Google Scholar
Yngvesson, Barbara (1988) “Making Law at the Doorway: The Clerk, the Court, and the Construction of Community in a New England Town,” 22 Law & Society Rev. 409–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar